The last item in the magazine that really caught my attention was the {END BRACKET} piece. That is usually pretty good and why often I will be reading a magazine I will flip to the last page to determine if I want to keep on reading. Often it is sort of a recap of everything in the magazine, at other times it is completely off topic. Note I do NOT do this with books. If a book doesn’t get me in the first few sections or in the TOC, the book doesn’t get me.
So the topic this time is about something I had never heard of at MSFT called Singularity. This isn’t surprising to me, MSFT is huge and doing a ton of R&D even though the nay-sayers say they don’t come up with anything new, they just copy… I would wonder if they are copying, how come no one is beating them out? But anyway, I don’t intent to start a flame war on this entry.
First off, singularity is a cool name. I like the article based on the name itself, but what it is about is even cooler. The website for singularity is http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/.
Basically it is “new” thinking on OSÂ and compiler design. The article goes on to talk about making a system so that managed code (like the stuff dotNET is producing) can be fast and efficient. It describes how the compiler can be smart enough and the OS can be smart enough to effect a fast efficient response with compiled binaries with smaller memory footprints than an equivilent c/c++ program running on UNIX or Windows.
I don’t know about you, but I think that is incredibly cool. But it does make me start asking all sorts of WHY questions of MSFT… Like….
Why didn’t you do it this way for real?
Why are you telling people dotNET is fast but your R&D people are admitting it isn’t and trying to find something that actually is?
There are more, in fact, you may have even more questions just from reading this entry but I can assure you you would almost certainly have more if you read their article – http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/06/EndBracket/
    joe
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